An interesting presentation hosted by Alexis Vaisse, Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Montpellier, during the latest GDC Europe (and now available via .PDF here) was spotted by Neogaf user Insane Metal.

The topic is one that is being discussed a lot in the development community: moving physics simulation (in this specific case, cloth simulation) from the CPU to the GPU. In order to do this, Ubisoft created Motion Cloth, which is running on all their latest games from Child of Light to Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, Rainbow Six: Siege and The Division.

Why would developers move a task that has been historically CPU bound to GPUs? Well, obviously in order to offset the disappointing CPU performance of both next generation consoles. As you can see in the benchmark below, Xbox One is barely above PlayStation 3 while incredibly, PlayStation 4 is below (this could be due to the supposed last minute CPU overclock done by Microsoft).

Now, things are much different once the task is moved to GPGPU. This is particularly true for PS4 GPGPU, which was able to render 1600 dancers, almost doubling XB1 GPGPU (830); this isn’t unexpected, as the primary hardware advantage of PS4 alongside its GDDR5 is having 50% more Compute Units (18 vs 12).

This is another proof that Compute, and specifically Async Compute is the future of next generation and particularly PlayStation 4, as stated by Sucker Punch and Zombie Studios, while Q-Games is already using it on The Tomorrow Children. Many games on PlayStation 4 Xbox One don’t even use this properly, but they will soon.